Microsoft has just released a developer preview of their upcoming operating system Windows 8. Users from all over the world can download the preview and install it on their systems. There is only one restriction with regards to the installation: You cannot update an existing copy of Windows, the Windows 8 installation requires a clean install.

I thought it would be perfect for my Acer notebook. It is fairly underpowered by today’s standards, and does not come with a DVD drive which I could use otherwise to install Windows 8.

The only viable option in this case is to install from USB keys, sticks or drives. Installation is a little bit difficulty, as it requires more preparation than just burning an ISO image to disk and putting that ISO into the DVD drive of the computer.

You need an USB key with at least four Gigabytes of free space. The first step is to format the key with the FAT32 file system. This is done by connecting the USB key to the computer, right-clicking its drive letter and selecting Format from the options. The Format window pops up where you need to make sure that Fat32 is the selected file system. Everything else can be left as is.

Wait until the formatting has finished. You now need access to the Windows 8 ISO or DVD. The developer preview is only provided as an ISO image. Check out Windows 8 Download for instructions or download the developer preview right here.

The easiest way to copy Windows 8 to an USB drive and make that drive bootable at the same time is to use Microsoft’s Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. While designed specifically for Windows 7, it appears to work just fine to create a bootable Windows 8 USB key as well.

Just select the Windows 8 ISO when asked to pick an ISO image from the computer. Then select to copy the contents to an USB drive. The program will copy all files to the drive and make that drive bootable at the same time. You can download the Microsoft tool from here.

Install Windows 8

You plug in your USB key into the computer you want to install Windows 8 on. You need to tell the computer on first start to boot from USB and not from hard drive or another location. This is done in the Bios. You usually enter the Bios with F1, F1, Delete, Esc or another key that is highlighted on the screen on Post. Press that key and look for an entry that says Boot or Boot order and make sure that USB has the highest priority on the system. You can easily repeat the steps if the computer is not booting from USB.

The computer should pick up the installation files on the USB drive automatically and installation should commence.

Windows 8 has the following system requirements:

1 Gigahertz or faster 32-bit or 64-bit processor
1 Gigabyte of RAM for 32-bit, 2 Gigabytes of RAM for 64-bit minimum
16 Gigabyte hard drive for 32-bit systems, 20 Gigabyte for 64-bit systems
Direct X 9 graphics card
Update: It is also possible to install Windows 8 by mounting the ISO image directly on another Windows system. The instructions have been posted on Reddit (via):

If you want to install the Windows Developer Preview, but have no blank DVDs or usable thumb drives, fear not. It’s fairly simple. This assumes you are installing the preview on a computer already running Windows, of course.

Download the ISO file from Microsoft.
Mount the ISO using Daemon Tools, Clone Drive, or similar.
This is important. Do not use the autorun installer. The autorun installer only allows you to upgrade your existing Windows installation and will not allow you to install to a separate hard drive or partition.
Navigate to the virtual install disc and go to the folder called “sources”.
Run setup.exe and proceed as if installing Windows Vista or 7.

The Windows 8 developer preview is out for all to try, but installing it over your main Windows setup is a scary (and unrealistic) prospect. Here’s how to dual boot Windows 8 with your current Windows 7 installation so you can run them both side by side.
If you’ve ever dual booted a machine before, this shouldn’t seem too foreign. All you need to do is create a new partition for Windows 8, install it on that partition, and then edit your new boot menu so Windows 7 stays the default OS. Here’s how to do it.

Step One: Create a New Partition

Before you start, make a backup of your data—you’re going to be formatting drives and installing OSes, so anything could go wrong, and you don’t want to lose your whole system. When you’re ready, we’ll need to create some space for Windows 8 on your hard drive. Assuming you have at least 20GB of space free on your drive, you’re going to use Windows’ Disk Management to set partition those 20GB for Windows 8. Open the Start Menu and right click on the “Computer” option. Click “Manage”, and in the window that appears, click on “Disk Management” in the left sidebar.

Find your system hard disk in the graphical list that appears in the bottom pane. Right-click on it and then click “Shrink Volume”. Shrink it down so you have at least 20GB of space left on the end of the drive, and click OK. Then, click on the “Unallocated” block of that drive that appears and click “New Simple Volume”. Click Next on the next few windows until you get to the “Format Partition” window. Here, give it a volume label you’ll recognize (like “Windows 8″) and click Next. It should format the drive for you. Now you’re all set to install Windows 8.

Step Two: Install Windows 8

If you haven’t downloaded the Developer Preview ISO yet, head over to the Windows Developer Center and download it. Burn it onto a DVD using something like ImgBurn,or burn it to a thumb drive if you don’t have a DVD drive in your machine. Make sure your computer is set to boot from CD or USB, stick in your installation media, and reboot.

If you get a prompt to “Press any key to boot from DVD”, then hit a key on your keyboard. You should boot right into the Windows 8 installer. It actually looks almost exactly like the Windows 7 installer, so it should seem a little familiar. Just pick your language, hit “Install Now”, and choose “Custom” when asked what type of install you’d like to perform.

On the next screen, find your new partition on the list of drives. Make sure it’s the right one, because you’re about to write over whatever’s on it. Hit “Next” and let the installer do its thing. When you’re done, your computer should reboot into Windows 8. It’ll probably reboot one more time after it does, then you’ll be greeted with the Windows 8 Start screen. If you choose to enter a Windows Live ID here, make sure you have access to your email and can confirm your computer—otherwise it might not let you boot into it.

Step Three: Make Windows 7 the Default (Optional)

You’ll notice when you first boot up into Windows 8 that you’re presented with a new graphical boot menu that’ll let you choose between your Windows 7 and Windows 8 installations. Windows 8 will be the default, meaning if you don’t manually choose Windows 7 from the menu, your computer will boot into Windows 8 after three seconds of inactivity. Chances are, you don’t want to make Windows 8 the default quite yet, so here’s how to make Windows 7 the default.

On the boot menu, click on the button at the bottom that says “Change Defaults or Choose Other Options”, and hit “Choose the Default Operating System”. From there, you can pick Windows 7 from the menu. From now on, your computer will boot into Windows 7 by default, but if you feel like playing around with Windows 8 that day, you can just pick it from the boot menu. Enjoy playing with the developer preview, and let us know what you think in the comments.

The tool, when directed to use an ISO dumped via ImgBurn, would error out. Everything was to UDF spec, so what was going on here?

I’m not a UDF expert, hell not even a novice, but I skimmed through ECMA-167 and the reflected tool code. It appears there are two (possibly more) “navigation buoys” within UDF-formatted ISOs that point to important chunks of the image called Anchor Volume Descriptor Pointers (AVDPs). The first AVDP is somewhere near the top of the image. The last AVDP is located in what appears to be the last logical block of the image. (My guess is this is to support bi-directional reading.)

So assuming each logical block of the image is 2048 bytes large, one could also assume the last logical block is –2048 from the end of the file, right? Well, that’s what the tool assumes. It checks for the last AVDP at the start of the last logical block, doesn’t find it, and bombs out.

I haven’t read through the entire spec., but I doubt there’s anything in here regarding the container of the UDF formatted data.

While one could argue Microsoft Store-downloaded ISOs are comprised in a compatible manner and therefore this scenario is unsupported it wouldn’t have been hard to add some AVDP seeking code.

As a quick hack to resolve this issue, I wrote a tool that merely finds the AVDP in your ISO file and copies it to offset (EOF-2048). This will allow you to use your own ISOs with the Microsoft tool. Microsoft.NET 2.x or higher required.

Source: http://withinwindows.com

What if your Windows 7 becomes corrupt and fails to boot? Most laptops and PCs today come with Windows pre-installed and the manufacturers sometimes don’t include Windows installation disc.

This is where Recovery Disk come into play. It is recommended that users create a recovery disk as soon as possible and keep it in a safe location. In case your Windows 7 fails to boot, the recovery disk can help fix the problem.

To create a recovery disk in Windows 7, go through the following steps:

Click Start Orb and go to Control Panel. Here, select Back up your computer under the System and Security option.

From the left sidebar, select Create a system repair disk. Finally select your CD-R/RW or DVD-R/RW drive from the new dialog window and hit Create Disc.

It will start creating a disc instantly. Once complete, hit OK, label it, and save the disk in a safe location.

The total file size of the recovery disk is 164MB which means you can burn it to a CD instead of DVD.

In case you forgot to create a recovery disk and your Windows 7 fails to boot, you can ask your friend or co-worker to create you one. If all else fails, below you will find the ISO image I have created, you can download and burn the ISO image directly to a CD or DVD.

There are a lot of great tutorials on how to create a bootable USB drive from the Windows 7 ISO which Microsoft recently released. This is primarily a good solution for those of us with netbooks without CD drives. Unfortunately, a majority of these tutorials utilize a program called “diskpart”, which is a command line utility for managing partitions and disks. Here is an easier solution:

1. Ensure you have a USB Drive with more than 3GB capacity
2. Download and Install Daemon Tools Lite (or your favorite Virtual CD emulator)
3. Get Windows 7
4. Download and Install the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool
5. Download and Extract MBRWizard

Insert the USB Drive

Launch the HP USB Storage Format Tool. Select your USB drive for device. Select NTFS for File system. Check Quick Format. Click Start to format the USB drive.

Mount the Windows 7 Beta ISO with Daemon Tools (make note of drive letter it assigns)

Set the USB drive to be the active partition with MBRWizard: Open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> cmd) and navigate to the directory where you extracted MBRWizard. Execute the following command: mbrwiz /list.

You should see your USB Drive in the list. Make note of the disk numbers next to the drives. In the following example, the HP Mini hard drive is drive #0 and the USB Drive is drive #1.

Execute the following command to set the USB drive to active: mbrwiz /disk=1 /active=1 In my example, the /disk=1 corresponds on the drive number of the USB drive. Make sure yours matches. Answer “Y” to the confirmation

Execute another list to ensure the active status has been updated. The USB Drive is now ready to be set to be bootable.

In the same command prompt, execute the following command to set the USB drive to be bootable: e:\boot\bootsect /nt60 D: (E: is the drive letter of the Windows 7 Beta ISO and D: is the drive letter of your USB drive)

Copy the contents of the Windows 7 Beta to your USB Drive

Everything should be ready. Reboot your HP Mini 1000, and on the boot screen hit F9. Select your USB drive from the dropdown list.

If it doesn’t boot, check the following:

The USB Drive is formatted properly.

The USB Drive has all the contents of the Windows 7 Beta ISO (including hidden files)

The USB Drive partition is set to “active” (mbrwiz /list)

Via: Bwana